Owen Coggins
Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in Politics at Brunel University London (2019-2022)
Honorary Associate of the Religious Studies Department at the Open University, Milton Keynes.
Trustee of Oaken Palace Records, Registered Charity 1154786.
Formerly Researcher at Nordoff Robbins Music Therapy, London (2017-2019)
Honorary Associate of the Religious Studies Department at the Open University, Milton Keynes.
Trustee of Oaken Palace Records, Registered Charity 1154786.
Formerly Researcher at Nordoff Robbins Music Therapy, London (2017-2019)
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Books by Owen Coggins
Owen Coggins shows that while many drone metal listeners identify as non-religious, their ways of engaging with and talking about drone metal are richly informed by mysticism, ritual and religion. He explores why language relating to mysticism and spiritual experience is so prevalent in drone metal culture and in discussion of musical experiences and practices of the genre.
The author develops the work of Michel de Certeau to provide an empirically grounded theory of mysticism in popular culture. He argues that the marginality of the genre culture, together with the extremely abstract sound produces a focus on the listeners' engagement with sound, and that this in turn creates a space for the open-ended exploration of religiosity in extreme states of bodily consciousness.
Table of contents
List of figures
Acknowledgements
1. Introduction: Mysticism and metal music
2. To be experienced not understood: Empirical mysticisms in dub, trance and drone
3. Beyond heaviness: Listener experience in a translocal and marginal genre
4. Pilgrimages to elsewhere: Languages of ineffability, otherness, and ambiguity
5. Amplifier worship: Materiality and mysticism in heavy sound
6. Methods to cross the abyss: Ritual, violence and noise
7. Conclusion: Drone metal mysticism
References
Index
Papers by Owen Coggins
Owen Coggins shows that while many drone metal listeners identify as non-religious, their ways of engaging with and talking about drone metal are richly informed by mysticism, ritual and religion. He explores why language relating to mysticism and spiritual experience is so prevalent in drone metal culture and in discussion of musical experiences and practices of the genre.
The author develops the work of Michel de Certeau to provide an empirically grounded theory of mysticism in popular culture. He argues that the marginality of the genre culture, together with the extremely abstract sound produces a focus on the listeners' engagement with sound, and that this in turn creates a space for the open-ended exploration of religiosity in extreme states of bodily consciousness.
Table of contents
List of figures
Acknowledgements
1. Introduction: Mysticism and metal music
2. To be experienced not understood: Empirical mysticisms in dub, trance and drone
3. Beyond heaviness: Listener experience in a translocal and marginal genre
4. Pilgrimages to elsewhere: Languages of ineffability, otherness, and ambiguity
5. Amplifier worship: Materiality and mysticism in heavy sound
6. Methods to cross the abyss: Ritual, violence and noise
7. Conclusion: Drone metal mysticism
References
Index
Chants loud robed priest down onto the freedomseed
Burnt offering redeems completes smoked deliverance
Caravan’s stoned deliverants
The Caravan holds to Eastern creed
Now smokes believer
--Sleep, Jerusalem/Dopesmoker (1997/2003) http://sleepsl.bandcamp.com/releases
My doctoral research concerns the intoxications of mystical, musical and narcotic experience in an underground subgenre of heavy metal. Drone metal features extremely long, hypnotic, minimalist but overwhelming compositions of feedback, distortion and noise. Frequent references to mystical texts and traditions, and to psychedelic intoxicants are made in the sound and artwork of recordings, in performance practices, and in the discourse of listeners and musicians surrounding the music. At a drone metal performance, a fellow listener I have just met passes me a marijuana joint in order to enhance shared experience; during my final funding interview, I am questioned regarding the methodological implications of building a research proposal around a recording entitled Dopesmoker ; at another drone performance, I must decide whether to lie on the floor with my eyes closed, fully immersed in the physical sound vibrations like many in the audience, or whether to remain seated in order to observe the interactions of musicians, listeners and venue staff. In drone metal, the language of religious ecstasy is used to describe sonic experience; drug references are employed to communicate about spirituality; and the effects of drone metal sound are described as analogous to experiences with psychoactive chemicals. A central focus of my research is examining how these overlapping frameworks are used to represent and understand intoxication, while avoiding the reductionism of privileging any one particular category. Drawing on the work of Michel de Certeau and Jeffrey Kripal, whose texts in different ways perform the author’s textual or spiritual intoxications, as well as extensive literature linking sound, mysticism and entheogens, I engage with the challenges of observing, discussing and writing the intoxication of others, while also attempting to represent my own intoxication (or lack of it), and its relation to the intoxication of others.
Bong’s extended, meditative, droning jams are frequently situated within Dunsany’s worlds, through song and album titles (“Onward to Perdondaris;” “The Dreams of Mana-Yood-Sushai;” “Bethmoora” ), and in creating the bands distinctive sonic atmosphere . Bong’s 20-minute tracks often open with a short but evocative few lines, quoted from or inspired by Dunsany, a departure point for a pilgrimage of the imagination into drone metal sound . I compare Bong’s exploration of Dunsany’s cities, journeys, dreams and gods with the references to more established mystical traditions elsewhere in drone metal, examining the relations between literature and music (in particular, fantastic literature and religious texts in heavy metal) and investigate the implications, parallels and divergences in drone metal’s appeals to the cosmic fantasies of, on one hand, early 20th Century weird fiction, and on the other, foundational scriptures of world religions.
Huxley was a product of his agnostic-scientific family and early 20th Century Anglo-American ideals of rationalist progress. Certeau's intellectual trajectory was contrastingly defined by the May 1968 uprising in Paris and the continental cultural and literary theory of that time. Huxley and Certeau treated similar topics very differently, reflecting the intellectual milieus in which they moved: Huxley wrote the possession as fictionalised novel, his colourful and imaginative interpretation, defending the accused from unenlightened irrationality in institutionalised religion. Certeau takes an almost opposite approach, stepping back as writer in order to present, arrange and comment upon a wealth of contemporary documentary sources, assiduously attempting to render visible his own choices and operations, and their impact on the material, in order to address not only the "facts" of the case, but also our continuing production of historical truth through archival practices and editing choices.
Huxley and Certeau, then, stand for consecutive moments of ascendancy in the history of ideas in the 20th Century, first of Anglo-American and then Continental philosophy. Huxley was the rigorously scientific-minded experimenter who came to something like a faith in a mystical-agnostic perennialism; Certeau the Jesuit theologian who fully accepted and responded to the death of God. That these open-minded and omnivorous thinkers from different intellectual traditions, both startlingly talented writers, became fascinated, even obsessed with mystical experiences which escaped language, speaks both to the continuing resonance of a transcendental spirituality in society, and to their common ethical humanity in attempting to communicate their versions of it.
In his recorded songs, Johnson offered apocalyptic vignettes rooted in deep knowledge of scripture. Johnson conflated, with complex creative and political results, different paradises. Some theological/scriptural: the Old Testament search for, and epic journey to, the land of Canaan promised to God's chosen people; the post-death heaven of eternal life for any believer in the good news of the New Testament; and the apocalypse of the Revelation. Other paradises were political and earthly: utopian dream for political emancipation of African-Americans and transformation of society in the South; and the paradise of freedom after escaping the oppression of the South in the Northern cities or Canada.
A frequently employed example is the multivalent significance of the crossing of rivers. The river may be the figurative boundary between the living and the dead, a geographical boundary or location relating to travel northwards, the river to be crossed in order to reach Canaan, and also any political or ideological obstacle between the contemporary situation and the imagined paradise of emancipation.
The dense mix of symbols and layering of current, Biblical and suggested future events (such as ), lend an elusiveness to meaning necessary in an oppressive racist society, but also offer rich possibilities for meaning to be produced in connections and interactions between levels of suggested and explicit narrative. The weaving of different levels of textual reference is matched in sound by such devices as use of different voices (in Johnson's various different vocal styles, as well as with backing singers), varying levels of decipherability of lyrics, the replacement of some vocal lines with slide guitar lines, removing words yet leaving traces of implied words, while also pointing towards their removal.
The strength and depth of, and contemporary legitimacy of, Christian myth afforded an acceptable site discourse through which to communicate subaltern expression of paradise hoped for. The apocalyptic thunder of Johnson's voice, the force of his Biblical invocations, and the glossolalic strains of his guitar, figure in sound the possibilities of better worlds, presaging the position and function of faith and music, able to be expressed more explicitly, in later Civil Rights struggles.
I use drone metal as a loose label for various musicians such as Sleep, Earth and Sunn 0))), involved in making sound at the limits of music, drawing on classical and jazz avant-garde traditions as well as world sacred musics while testing the limits of rock/heavy metal. These musicians make frequent use of various religious, mystical or occult signs, sounds, and practices in their music, as well as drawing on spiritual themes such as transcendence in avant-garde jazz and classical music; use of chanting and meditative drones in world sacred musics; and the complex iconography of (anti-)Christian imagery in heavy metal. I invoke the work of Michel de Certeau on mysticism, in which he observes various features of mystical writings, such as a stretching of language to breaking point in order to gesture towards the unsayable; a reserving of sacred texts for an initiated audience; themes of wandering, space and absence; references to the truth present in other texts but absent in one’s own text. I outline how, in recordings, artwork, surrounding discussions, performance and listening rituals, similar features and practices can be discerned in noise music: the codes of music are similarly strained in attempts at transcendence; and I argue a similar project is attempted. In this way, I argue, noise musicians are not only conducting a discourse or making art about religious practices and mystical experience, but are themselves involved in creating mystical texts.
While many noise musicians are not explicitly political, the transgressive nature of noise music has political implications. Some musicians consciously employ the radical elements of their work toward what NON founder Boyd Rice terms an 'aesthetic fascism’, a designation criticised by those more militant for using the qualifier “aesthetic”. Others remain silent about their personal politics as well as thier identities and personal histories, while using shockingly extreme images, sounds and ideas. Some, such as Laibach, employ symbols of totalitarian communist and fascist regimes in what Slavoj Zizek terms “overidentification,” an excessive commitment to a certain ideology or code in order to expose its contradictions or unsavoury consequences. A strange tension is produced between an uncompromising and undoubtedly extreme aesthetic, and ambiguity about the purpose, or ideological standpoints of those who make and use these production.
Shock may be sought in order to provoke, and to circumscribe an elite in-group, as well as to either support or to deflate extremist agendas. Black metal musician Varg Vikernes suggests that sharing his radical racial paganism is not necessary for fans of his music, and it is listened to by those who fully agree with, and some who disdain such politics. I explore the claimed purposes and varied effects of such disparate transgressive aesthetics for both creators and listeners, where the common factor is not any particular form or direction of radicalism, but radical extremism itself as an aesthetic goal.
I suggest sound is an appropriate medium for addressing the question of these distinctions: noise is inherently transgressive and therefore is given radical potential, whether defined with Jacques Attali as a challenge to the current musical order and hence to the social order; or as interruption to signal and thereby information at a higher level of abstraction. If, as Hannah Arendt claims, power and violence are opposites, then noise may be a synthesis, of the threat of violence and actual physical violence.
Firstly, I outline Tolkien references in 60s and 70s rock music, from Rush’s ‘Rivendell’ to psychedelic band Gandalf and the Middle Earth rock club, noting that these references draw upon a somewhat conservative pastoralism. Perhaps ironically, considering the subsequent failure of the counterculture revolution, these references seem to ignore or downplay the pessimistic tone particularly evident at the end of Lord of the Rings.
Black metal references, by contrast, focus almost exclusively on Tolkien's evil. I investigate their treatments and repositionings in the context of other uses of evil in metal, most obviously the Devil and Satanism. Christian symbols are transvalued and inverted, and Tolkien’s evil is valued as good- but while the overarching mythology of Christianity is treated with contempt, Tolkien’s vast mythological project is received far more positively. I suggest that this is due to a shared valorisation of, yet estrangement from, a pre-Christian, North European cultural identity, in both Tolkien’s works and in Canadian black metal.
I explore black metal’s focus on places (Gorgoroth, Isengard, Khazad-Dum, Moria) and races (Orcs, Uruk-Hai) rather than specific characters, suggesting that the evocative mystery and rich extra- or counter-narrative potential of Tolkien’s wider world appeal more than fixed narrative details of individual characters. The few individual characters drawn upon reinforce this view, as they are often the oldest, most deliberately mysterious non-human creatures: the Balrog, the Nazgul, Shelob. Finally, I suggest that references to Tolkien shed light on black metal's acknowledgement of the fictionality of its constructions, while, more importantly, recognising the vital truth accessible through myths (musical, literary, oral) and their retelling."
The comunero political system is valorised as communal, truly democratic and egalitarian, as distinct from centralised bureaucratic state power such as that found in the state governments in Oaxaca City. Yet the interminable loud broadcasts of news, announcements, advertisements, prize draws and music from the loudspeaker mast at the Palacio Municipal revealed a complete centralisation of sonic power. I describe how attention to sonic practices in the town contrasts with claims made about locality, local communal power and resistance to external forces of state and capital.
I then discuss debates surrounding environmentalism, exploring the different conceptions at play in new ecotourism businesses. Locals seek to gain from preserving and presenting something of value to outsiders, and the interplay between values and perceived values of locals and tourists will be a key factor in the political economy of ecology in the region. The clash between environmentalisms is obvious in the differing approaches and expectations of sound in environment: on one hand preservation for sustainable exploitation, on the other, a romanticised idea of protected natural tranquility.
Finally, I offer some reflections on the implications of attention to sonic environments, with respect to important negotiations and representations of identity in Ixtlan. I conclude that attentiveness to sound can reveal neglected perspectives and offer new insights to how discussions are framed and conducted."